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e Golden Bowl
“Wives, papa,” she said; “are always much better
reporters—though I grant,” she added for Charlotte, “that
fathers are not much better than husbands. He never,” she
smiled, “tells me more than a tenth of what you tell him;
so I hope you haven’t told him everything yet, since in that
case I shall probably have lost the best part of it.” Maggie
went, she went—she felt herself going; she reminded herself
of an actress who had been studying a part and rehearsing
it, but who suddenly, on the stage, before the footlights, had
begun to improvise, to speak lines not in the text. It was this
very sense of the stage and the footlights that kept her up,
made her rise higher: just as it was the sense of action that
logically involved some platform—action quite positively
for the rst time in her life, or, counting in the previous
afternoon, for the second. e platform remained for three
or four days thus sensibly under her feet, and she had all
the while, with it, the inspiration of quite remarkably, of
quite heroically improvising. Preparation and practice had
come but a short way; her part opened out, and she invented
from moment to moment what to say and to do. She had
but one rule of art—to keep within bounds and not lose her
head; certainly she might see for a week how far that would
take her. She said to herself, in her excitement, that it was
perfectly simple: to bring about a dierence, touch by touch,
without letting either of the three, and least of all her father,
so much as suspect her hand. If they should suspect they
would want a reason, and the humiliating truth was that
she wasn’t ready with a reason—not, that is, with what she
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would have called a reasonable one. She thought of herself,
instinctively, beautifully, as having dealt, all her life, at her
father’s side and by his example, only in reasonable reasons;
and what she would really have been most ashamed of would
be to produce for HIM, in this line, some inferior substitute.
Unless she were in a position to plead, denitely, that she
was jealous she should be in no position to plead, decently,
that she was dissatised. is latter condition would be
a necessary implication of the former; without the former
behind it it would HAVE to fall to the ground. So had the
case, wonderfully, been arranged for her; there was a card she
could play, but there was only one, and to play it would be to
end the game. She felt herself—as at the small square green
table, between the tall old silver candlesticks and the neatly
arranged counters—her father’s playmate and partner; and
what it constantly came back to, in her mind, was that for
her to ask a question, to raise a doubt, to reect in any degree
on the play of the others, would be to break the charm. e
charm she had to call it, since it kept her companion so
constantly engaged, so perpetually seated and so contentedly
occupied. To say anything at all would be, in ne, to have
to say WHY she was jealous; and she could, in her private
hours, but stare long, with suused eyes, at that impossibility.
By the end of a week, the week that had begun, especially,
with her morning hour, in Eaton Square, between her father
and his wife, her consciousness of being beautifully treated
had become again verily greater than her consciousness of
anything else; and I must add, moreover, that she at last found
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herself rather oddly wondering what else, as a consciousness,
could have been quite so overwhelming. Charlotte’s response
to the experiment of being more with her OUGHT, as she
very well knew, to have stamped the experiment with the
feeling of success; so that if the success itself seemed a boon
less substantial than the original image of it, it enjoyed
thereby a certain analogy with our young woman’s aftertaste
of Amerigo’s own determined demonstrations. Maggie was
to have retained, for that matter, more than one aftertaste,
and if I have spoken of the impressions xed in her as soon as
she had, so insidiously, taken the eld, a denite note must be
made of her perception, during those moments, of Charlotte’s
prompt uncertainty. She had shown, no doubt—she couldn’t
not have shown—that she had arrived with an idea; quite
exactly as she had shown her husband, the night before, that
she was awaiting him with a sentiment. is analogy in the
two situations was to keep up for her the remembrance of
a kinship of expression in the two faces in respect to which
all she as yet professed to herself was that she had aected
them, or at any rate the sensibility each of them so admirably
covered, in the same way. To make the comparison at all was,
for Maggie, to return to it often, to brood upon it, to extract
from it the last dregs of its interest—to play with it, in short,
nervously, vaguely, incessantly, as she might have played
with a medallion containing on either side a cherished little
portrait and suspended round her neck by a gold chain of a
rm neness that no eort would ever snap. e miniatures
were back to back, but she saw them forever face to face,
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and when she looked from one to the other she found in
Charlotte’s eyes the gleam of the momentary “What does
she really want?” that had come and gone for her in the
Prince’s. So again, she saw the other light, the light touched
into a glow both in Portland Place and in Eaton Square, as
soon as she had betrayed that she wanted no harm—wanted
no greater harm of Charlotte, that is, than to take in that
she meant to go out with her. She had been present at that
process as personally as she might have been present at some
other domestic incident—the hanging of a new picture, say,
or the tting of the Principino with his rst little trousers.
She remained present, accordingly, all the week, so
charmingly and systematically did Mrs. Verver now welcome
her company. Charlotte had but wanted the hint, and what
was it but the hint, after all, that, during the so subdued but
so ineaceable passage in the breakfast-room, she had seen
her take? It had been taken moreover not with resignation,
not with qualications or reserves, however bland; it had
been taken with avidity, with gratitude, with a grace of
gentleness that supplanted explanations. e very liberality
of this accommodation might indeed have appeared in the
event to give its own account of the matter—as if it had fairly
written the Princess down as a person of variations and had
accordingly conformed but to a rule of tact in accepting these
caprices for law. e caprice actually prevailing happened to
be that the advent of one of the ladies anywhere should, till the
t had changed, become the sign, unfailingly, of the advent of
the other; and it was emblazoned, in rich colour, on the bright
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face of this period, that Mrs. Verver only wished to know,
on any occasion, what was expected of her, only held herself
there for instructions, in order even to better them if possible.
e two young women, while the passage lasted, became
again very much the companions of other days, the days of
Charlotte’s prolonged visits to the admiring and bountiful
Maggie, the days when equality of condition for them had
been all the result of the latter’s native vagueness about her
own advantages. e earlier elements ushed into life again,
the frequency, the intimacy, the high pitch of accompanying
expression—appreciation, endearment, condence; the rarer
charm produced in each by this active contribution to the
felicity of the other: all enhanced, furthermore—enhanced
or qualied, who should say which?—by a new note of
diplomacy, almost of anxiety, just sensible on Charlotte’s
part in particular; of intensity of observance, in the matter
of appeal and response, in the matter of making sure the
Princess might be disposed or gratied, that resembled an
attempt to play again, with more renement, at disparity of
relation. Charlotte’s attitude had, in short, its moments of
owering into pretty excesses of civility, self-eacements in
the presence of others, sudden little formalisms of suggestion
and recognition, that might have represented her sense of
the duty of not “losing sight” of a social distinction. is
impression came out most for Maggie when, in their easier
intervals, they had only themselves to regard, and when her
companion’s inveteracy of never passing rst, of not sitting
till she was seated, of not interrupting till she appeared to
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give leave, of not forgetting, too, familiarly, that in addition
to being important she was also sensitive, had the eect of
throwing over their intercourse a kind of silver tissue of
decorum. It hung there above them like a canopy of state, a
reminder that though the lady-in-waiting was an established
favourite, safe in her position, a little queen, however, goodnatured, was always a little queen and might, with small
warning, remember it.
And yet another of these concomitants of feverish
success, all the while, was the perception that in another
quarter too things were being made easy. Charlotte’s alacrity
in meeting her had, in one sense, operated slightly overmuch
as an intervention: it had begun to reabsorb her at the very
hour of her husband’s showing her that, to be all there, as the
phrase was, he likewise only required—as one of the other
phrases was too—the straight tip. She had heard him talk
about the straight tip, in his moods of amusement at English
slang, in his remarkable displays of assimilative power, power
worthy of better causes and higher inspirations; and he had
taken it from her, at need, in a way that, certainly in the
rst glow of relief, had made her brief interval seem large.
en, however, immediately, and even though supercially,
there had declared itself a readjustment of relations to which
she was, once more, practically a little sacriced. “I must do
everything,” she had said, “without letting papa see what
I do—at least till it’s done!” but she scarce knew how she
proposed, even for the next few days, to blind or beguile
this participant in her life. What had in fact promptly
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enough happened, she presently recognised, was that if her
stepmother had beautifully taken possession of her, and if
she had virtually been rather snatched again thereby from
her husband’s side, so, on the other hand, this had, with as
little delay, entailed some very charming assistance for her in
Eaton Square. When she went home with Charlotte, from
whatever happy demonstration, for the benet of the world
in which they supposed themselves to live, that there was
no smallest reason why their closer association shouldn’t be
public and acclaimed—at these times she regularly found that
Amerigo had come either to sit with his father-in-law in the
absence of the ladies, or to make, on his side, precisely some
such display of the easy working of the family life as would
represent the equivalent of her excursions with Charlotte.
Under this particular impression it was that everything in
Maggie most melted and went to pieces—every thing,
that is, that belonged to her disposition to challenge the
perfection of their common state. It divided them again, that
was true, this particular turn of the tide—cut them up afresh
into pairs and parties; quite as if a sense for the equilibrium
was what, between them all, had most power of insistence;
quite as if Amerigo himself were all the while, at bottom,
equally thinking of it and watching it. But, as against that,
he was making her father not miss her, and he could have
rendered neither of them a more excellent service. He was
acting in short on a cue, the cue given him by observation;
it had been enough for him to see the shade of change in
her behaviour; his instinct for relations, the most exquisite
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conceivable, prompted him immediately to meet and match
the dierence, to play somehow into its hands. at was
what it was, she renewedly felt, to have married a man who
was, sublimely, a gentleman; so that, in spite of her not
wanting to translate ALL their delicacies into the grossness
of discussion, she yet found again and again, in Portland
Place, moments for saying: “If I didn’t love you, you know, for
yourself, I should still love you for HIM.” He looked at her,
after such speeches, as Charlotte looked, in Eaton Square,
when she called HER attention to his benevolence: through
the dimness of the almost musing smile that took account of
her extravagance, harmless though it might be, as a tendency
to reckon with. “But my poor child,” Charlotte might under
this pressure have been on the point of replying, “that’s the
way nice people ARE, all round—so that why should one be
surprised about it? We’re all nice together—as why shouldn’t
we be? If we hadn’t been we wouldn’t have gone far—and I
consider that we’ve gone very far indeed. Why should you
‘take on’ as if you weren’t a perfect dear yourself, capable of
all the sweetest things?—as if you hadn’t in fact grown up in
an atmosphere, the atmosphere of all the good things that I
recognised, even of old, as soon as I came near you, and that
you’ve allowed me now, between you, to make so blessedly
my own.” Mrs. Verver might in fact have but just failed to
make another point, a point charmingly natural to her as a
grateful and irreproachable wife. “It isn’t a bit wonderful, I
may also remind you, that your husband should nd, when
opportunity permits, worse things to do than to go about
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with mine. I happen, love, to appreciate my husband—I
happen perfectly to understand that his acquaintance should
be cultivated and his company enjoyed.”
Some such happily-provoked remarks as these, from
Charlotte, at the other house, had been in the air, but we
have seen how there was also in the air, for our young
woman, as an emanation from the same source, a distilled
dierence of which the very principle was to keep down
objections and retorts. at impression came back—it had
its hours of doing so; and it may interest us on the ground of
its having prompted in Maggie a nal reection, a reection
out of the heart of which a light ashed for her like a great
ower grown in a night. As soon as this light had spread a
little it produced in some quarters a surprising distinctness,
made her of a sudden ask herself why there should have been
even for three days the least obscurity. e perfection of her
success, decidedly, was like some strange shore to which
she had been noiselessly ferried and where, with a start, she
found herself quaking at the thought that the boat might
have put o again and left her. e word for it, the word
that ashed the light, was that they were TREATING her,
that they were proceeding with her—and, for that matter,
with her father—by a plan that was the exact counterpart of
her own. It was not from her that they took their cue, but—
and this was what in particular made her sit up—from each
other; and with a depth of unanimity, an exact coincidence
of inspiration that, when once her attention had begun to
x it, struck her as staring out at her in recovered identities
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of behaviour, expression and tone. ey had a view of her
situation, and of the possible forms her own consciousness of
it might take—a view determined by the change of attitude
they had had, ever so subtly, to recognise in her on their
return from Matcham. ey had had to read into this small
and all-but-suppressed variation a mute comment—on they
didn’t quite know what; and it now arched over the Princess’s
head like a vault of bold span that important communication
between them on the subject couldn’t have failed of being
immediate. is new perception bristled for her, as we
have said, with odd intimations, but questions unanswered
played in and out of it as well—the question, for instance,
of why such promptitude of harmony SHOULD have been
important. Ah, when she began to recover, piece by piece, the
process became lively; she might have been picking small
shining diamonds out of the sweepings of her ordered house.
She bent, in this pursuit, over her dust-bin; she challenged to
the last grain the refuse of her innocent economy. en it was
that the dismissed vision of Amerigo, that evening, in arrest
at the door of her salottino while her eyes, from her placed
chair, took him in—then it was that this immense little
memory gave out its full power. Since the question was of
doors, she had afterwards, she now saw, shut it out; she had
responsibly shut in, as we have understood, shut in there with
her sentient self, only the fact of his reappearance and the
plenitude of his presence. ese things had been testimony,
after all, to supersede any other, for on the spot, even while
she looked, the warmly-washing wave had travelled far up
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